Berrah gets DOE funding for nanosystems research

Feb. 20, 2005

KALAMAZOO--A Western Michigan University physics professor
will continue her research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
using a new $564,000 federal grant that will help her unravel
the mysteries of nanosystems that are the bridge between gas-phase
matter and solid-state matter.

Dr. Nora Berrah will use the U.S. Department of Energy funding
to conduct her research over the next three years at the Advanced
Light Source, a research facility located at the Berkeley laboratory
in California. Berrah has been working at that facility for a
number of years and led a team of international scientists who
developed a sophisticated experimental research center there.

Her new funding will allow her to lead a WMU-centered team
of postdoctoral and graduate students as they use the Advanced
Light Source photon beam as a probing agent in an effort to understand
the electronic and magnetic properties present in a relatively
new area of study-metal clusters and their ions. The properties
of those clusters change as a function of cluster size, she says,
and little is currently known about them.

"A fundamental understanding of those clusters,"
she says, "will ultimately allow us to manipulate their
properties and make systems that can be tailored to our needs."

The clusters she is studying are aggregates of a few or several
hundred atoms that form a system with a nanometer dimension.
Understanding them, she says, will impact the development of
molecular electronics that may use clusters to create highly
functional miniature devices.

Berrah, a faculty member at WMU since 1991, has garnered more
than $4.3 million in external research funding during her time
at the University and has attracted significant international
acclaim. In addition to her current work at the Berkeley Advanced
Light Source, she has been named to the scientific advisory committee
for a new $500 million research facility being built at Stanford
University.

She is the co-team leader for all atomic and molecular research
at that new accelerator facility, which she characterizes as
a fourth generation light source in the form of a free electron
laser. When the Stanford facility opens in 2008, she plans to
continue her cluster research there, because the new light source
will allow her to measure in real time how clusters fragment,
ionize and change properties.

"To understand nature, we have to understand it at nature's
time scale," she says. "The new facility will offer
the opportunity to make huge breakthroughs in science. We'll
be able to understand how things assemble and disassemble and
do science with a real time resolution."

Berrah, a fellow of the American Physical Society since 1999,
was named a WMU Distinguished Faculty Scholar in 2000. In 2002
at Berkeley, she received the David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding
Achievement at the ALS. In addition to her research, Berrah serves
her discipline as a member of subcommittees of the national Committee
on the Status of Women in Physics, an advisory group that counsels
physics departments at universities around the nation on how
to create and sustain a working environment that is welcoming
to women scientists.